A thank-you apron.

I needed to make a "thank-you" gift for a girl in my ward. Still thinking of my color scheme from the table runner (see previous post), this combo stood out to me.




This is the most simple apron design I make. I lay out one of my Williams-Sonoma aprons onto the fabric, then trace the outline. Once you have the basic shape, you can embellish as much or as little as you are in the mood for (or have the time for!). In this case, I used the pocket tutorial from Dana of Dana Made It. Of course, I enlarged the pocket since this is an adult apron, and I left out the buttons. Finally, I added a 6 inch ruffle at the bottom. I hemmed the bottom of the ruffle, and serged the top edge. Next, I sewed my gathering stitch, gathered it up, and top stitched to attach to the apron. Super simple, but adds a nice feminine touch, if I do say so myself.

I don't really think it needs anything else, but I'm having fun with it, so I'm trying to decide if I should make a flower to attach up by the neck straps. Cute? Yes? No?

Christmas sewing is OVER!!

On December 23rd when all of my Christmas sewing was finished, I finally decided to make myself the table runner that I've admired of Liz's. Loosely following the tutorial found on the Craftzine blog, here is the finished result:




Trying to compliment my black and white curtains, while using the last bit of scrapes of some of my favorite fabrics, I hope this runner will have a place in my dining room for many years still to come.

Thanks for the hot tip Liz. Loved the inspiration from that tutorial. I ended up making my rectangles the same dimensions of those in the tutorial, I just made more of them, so that my finished length was 78" long. Lots of long, straight sewing lines. Kind of boring to sew, but anything but boring to look at when it was finished!!

It's the simple things...

That make my day! I got new fabric in the mail. Too bad I'm heading out of town tomorrow for almost 3 weeks. I might just have to make room for fabric and patterns in my luggage. The Anna Maria Horner and Amy Butler on the left came from Annee in Korea. The other four I found at a closeout sale in an Etsy shop, Imagine Fabric.

Portable DVD Case

Grace and George got a portable DVD player from Grandma Blanche for Christmas. It should come in handy with all of our traveling in the next week. I felt it was necessary to spend my evening making a special quilted case for it!! I have no idea if there is a tutorial out there for something like this. I'm sure there is. However, I decided to do this one all on my own.

If I had it to do all over again, I would length the flap that folds over. However, I'd say for making it up as I went along, I did a pretty good job. I'm satisfied.

Why I love to sew.

Grace got a dollhouse for Christmas. She was playing with it when she discovered that the bed didn't come with a pillow. There was an urgency in her voice. "Mama, the bed needs a pillow."

No problem! I let her choose her own fabric, and then had her help me stuff it with *cloud* (what she calls batting).

Nothing makes me more happy then being able to use my sewing abilities to solve a crisis in my little girl's life!!

Boy Shirts

I love the Super Hero shirt, but I wasn't sure if a 9 year old would think it was cool, so I kept it really simple. These shirts are for Christmas, but both of John's nephews have birthdays close to Christmas, so they are birthday shirts for Christmas. Kill two birds with one stone?!

Teak is 9.

Riley is 6.

I 0riginally saw this idea on House on Hill Road and knew that someone needed a shirt like it. I figured boys don't get excited about cute fabric, so I played it safe with felt.

Teacher Gifts

Here I loosely followed the same tutorial that Liz used on her welcome basket dish towels. I tried orienting my patchwork stripe going vertically instead of horizontally. I'm still undecided which way I like best. Sorry about the bad pictures. As per usual, these were done very late at night, and wrapped up immediately, I'm lucky to have remembered to take a picture at all.

The little fabric labels were purchased on Etsy here. I love the addition of the little Christmas sayings. All in all a fairly simple project to give out as neighbor and teacher gifts this year. Paired each towel with a Bath and Body Works foaming hands soap, and I'm done!